L'etat c'est Moi

You are here

Just thought I'd repost a little tidbit from Rick Perlstein's blog (author of Nixonland and the earlier Goldwater book). Throwing it out there for discussion and generally surprised how little he could find of this quote on the internet.

Daily Kos's McJoan unearths a quote from Dick Cheney's infamous Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair (here is an explanation of why this 1987 document is crucial to understanding the Bush administration's abuses of executive power) which I'd never seen before:

To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of the prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law.

I Googled it, figuring a gun belching so much smoke must be printed all over the Internet. I discovered to my surprise that it was not—Joan's is the only invocation—so I did a bit more researched and learned she gets one word wrong; it's not "monarchical notions of the prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law" but, even more monarchically, "monarchical notions of prerogative [no "the"] that will permit him to exceed the law." So the full quote (click here for context) runs like this:

To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law.

But guess what? That full quote still only shows up once on the Internet (from no less, um, unimpeachable a source that the official Government Printing Office document), and, but for the relatively recent existence of Google Book Search, wouldn't show up at all; and even the most salient four-word snatch only shows up sixteen times.

Again, surprising this hasn't made the rounds more often.

"But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself ... like Scheherazade and her king mixed up together in one, trying over and over to tell yourself your own story, and get it right" - You by Austin Grossman